“Ashur Ware was born at Sherburne, a son of Joseph Ware, a respectable farmer, and born in 1763. He graduated Harvard College in 1804, at which time he took part in a forensic disputation, Whether the law of nature be equally applicable to individuals and nations. He was a tutor at Cambridge from1810 to 1811, and professor of Greek from that period to 1815. He was an attorney-at-law in Boston, 1816, and an editor of the Boston Yankee, in company with Henry Orne. In 1817 Mr. Ware removed to Portland, and delivered another oration on our national independence, in that town. In 1820 he was elected a member of the corporation of Bowdoin College, which he occupied until 1844. In 1834 he was president of the Portland Athenaeum, and was officer of the Maine Historical Society. He has been many years from 1822, Judge of the U.S. District Court of Maine.
In 1839 Judge Ware married Sarah Morgridge, and has one son at college.
In 1839 he published Reports of Cases argued and determined in the District Court of the United Stated for the District of Maine, from 1822 to 1839, printed at Portland. This is a work of great legal learning. Judge Ware was the first Secretary of the State of Maine, on its separation, in 1820.
Judge Ware, in early life, entered the field of democracy, and warmly espoused its causes. His brilliant talents, displayed in the two oration, show him a devoted champion for the war with Great Britain, and a decided opponent of the Hartford Convention …”
Source: The Hundred Boston Orators From 1770 to 1852, by James Spear Loring, John P. Jewitt and Company, Cleveland, Ohio,1853, page 382-3
Interesting to find SOME information here on Judge Ware–the wiki page is barely bones. In my research of the life and work of Elizabeth Oakes Smith, I have found scores of references to “the Judge” in EOS’s correspondence with S.M Ware, who seems to have been one of her closest friends back in Portland, though most of their communication leaves the world of politics and law aside in favor of personal and family relations.